STITA cabbies sue Port for switching Sea-Tac contract

The Seattle-Tacoma International Taxi Association announced a lawsuit Monday seeking to prevent the Port of Seattle from switching STITA's airport contract to Yellow Cab.

Yellow won a recent competition to take over the airport concession, which would give Yellow near-exclusive rights to pick up arriving air travelers in the airport's taxi zone. The new contract with Yellow would cut down on "deadheading" — the practice of running an empty cab on the freeway to Sea-Tac — because Yellow drivers have licenses to pick up people in Seattle, unlike the typical STITA driver that lacks this city license. Yellow also proposed millions of dollars more than STITA in payments in exchange for the concession.

STITA drivers argue that they've done everything the Port asked for 20 years, transforming the airport taxi service from a chaotic mess into a quality operation with one of the country's greenest fleets of hybrid and natural gas taxis.

Yellow officials have said they would hire many STITA drivers, but STITA drivers who gathered Monday outside the King County Courthouse were skeptical about that. And as long as they are limited to county-only licenses, these drivers said, there won't be enough customers outside Seattle to sustain a living wage.

About 676,000 taxi trips were taken from the airport last year, STITA estimates.

The lawsuit seeks to block the Port from signing a new contract with Yellow, on grounds that the bidding process illegally discontinued the practice of basing concession fees on actual cost of service.

Mike Lindblom: 206-515-5631 or mlindblom@seattletimes.com